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PGP Keysigning Party, SCALE 10X

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2011-12-13 21:32

As many of you know, at nearly every SCALE I've organized a PGP keysigning party (if you're not familiar with PGP, see my PGP Guide). They've grown every year and we are now the biggest part of the "BoF" section of SCALE. Two years ago we broke our record with over 50 attendees and this year we hope to further strengthen the web of trust by breaking 100!

Of course, as the size of the keysigning party grows, the amount of time required grows quickly. After the first few years, it became clear the slowest piece was properly signing each UID on each key, so I wrote PIUS to automate the work while still allowing careful verification at each step.

With that bottleneck out of the way, it became clear that the party itself required a lot of prep work on the part of the already busy and tired participants. To alleviate that we started letting people enter their PGP key information when they register for the conference. This enabled us to provide all the required information without making people worry about signing emailing fingerprints or bringing enough copies to the party.

Then we realized that printing fingerprints on badges would allow those who couldn't make it to get and give more signature.

Each year we've improved this flow through steps such as improving the sign-up UI and adding additional verification to catch typographical errors in key information.

If you haven't yet signed up for SCALE don't forget to submit your key information, and if you already registered but forgot to include your key information, the keysigning party event page will tell you how to submit it after the fact!

So get your keys ready, sign up for SCALE and the PGP Keysigning Party, and I'll see you next month!